It can be difficult to know where to turn to find new music these days. With seemingly more music being made than ever, it can be easy to lose track. If you grew up reading the ‘inkies’, listening to John Peel and hunting through the racks at your High Street record shop and now don’t know where to turn, here are some ten suggestions - split into five categories - for how the internet can help you to find new music.

Recommendations The best way to find music you like has always been recommendations. In the past, those recommendations would have come from friends, your cool older brother/cousin or John Peel. Now, the internet can help too. Last.fm is a website that quietly tracks what you’re listening to and builds personalised charts to satisfy your inner Nick Hornby. After it has built up a sense of your taste it can make recommendations. If you connect with your friends then it will make recommendations based on what they are listening to as well.

A simpler approach is to use something like iTunes Genius. As well as making playlists based on your music library, Genius will also scan your library and deliver recommendations based on your collection.

Blogs If your childhood was spent waiting for the latest issue of Record Mirror or Sounds to arrive in the newsagents then you might wonder where to go to read about exciting new music. The NME looks like Smash Hits these days and Mojo and its ilk excel at in-depth retrospectives, not finger-on-the-pulse dispatches. These days the cutting edge is on music blogs. Abeano is one of the best: each day features several songs and videos from new artists.

Pitchfork, meanwhile, is ancient in internet terms, having been set up in 1995. Despite a reviewing style which has often been parodied, Pitchfork remains an indie rock authority.

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Stores Remember those cool record shops where you knew you could trust pretty much anything the staff recommended? These days there are fewer of them on the High Street but plenty online. Try eMusic, whose staff do a good job of highlighting the pick of new releases flooding in to the MP3 store each week.

It’s also worth visiting Bleep, which specialises in electronic music and frequently puts together excellent - and cheap - bundles of tracks.

Sharing Admit it, one of the main ways that you used to discover new music was by sharing tapes with friends. We all did it, whether it was carefully edited mix tapes or compilations nabbed off the top 40 radio show complete with heavy clicks every time the pause button went down. The online equivalent is equally illegal and considerably more likely to upset the music industry. Remember the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ campaign? Well, what home taping didn’t do, internet piracy might, if you believe the label bigwigs.

But we needn’t delve into filesharing. Instead pay Spotify a visit and you can rummage around to your heart’s content, listening to a massive catalogue of music. But it’s when you connect Spotify to your Facebook account that things really get interesting. Just drag a song onto a friend’s name to share it with them and if they do the same for you then you’ll get a running list of new songs in your inbox, all chosen by your friends.

mflow, another streaming service but one built entirely around the concept of sharing, offers user-generated playlists as well as playlists built around tags, such as ‘songwriter’ or ‘indie’. If you like a particular user’s playlists then you can follow them on mflow and hear more of their recommendations.

Apps Finally, no list of this nature would be complete without mentioning apps. If you have a smartphone or a tablet computer you’ll already be familiar with the concept of apps but increasingly they are becoming relevant to the web too as HTML 5 makes app-like functionality possible through a web browser.

That needn’t concern us now. Instead, here are two apps that will definitely help you find new music. Discovr Music, for the iPad, creates an interactive map of artists. Enter one of your favourites and watch as the app creates a tree showing related artists. Tap on one of those artists and the app will show you the artists connected to them, and so on. It’s a lot of fun to play with simply to see which artists it puts together but you’ll frequently discover new artists that are similar to your favourites.

A different approach, though no less visually appealing, is taken by Aweditorium. This app fills the screen with pictures. Click on one to hear the band concerned and learn more about them. If you don’t like them, just swipe the screen to hear someone else.